by: John Olin

September 19, 2005

The World Tour while not entirely difficult to complete should last you a good fifteen to twenty hours of play time if you want to get all the points possible as well as all the gold medals. You also aren't restricted from the more advanced tours for much time, as by the time you are completing Tour Four you have already unlocked up to Tour Eight. Eventually, the tracks do seem to run their course, and you end up back in tracks you have done before, but they are now more difficult and might have special catches to them. Even though it can get repetitive, you find yourself not able to turn away from the single-player, as it is also great practice for getting used to what is online. There is also a Eliminator match during World Tour, which systematically destroys whatever car is in last place every few seconds. There are other variations of racing, such as taking out as many cars as possible, but the AI in the game will also be trying to take you out, and in many cases it does a fantastic job of messing with you. Still, you can’t help but feel the AI is a bit to dumb in some instances, but it is definitely rewarding either way.

There are some minor glitches within the game when you are doing the World Tour. Specifically, you will be driving on a few surfaces with various elevations and you may end up going through them, seeing the sky and the game rewards you for 'Big Air'. Other than that, despite the games somewhat lenient take on physics and what you are doing when you take down an opponent, it is fine. It is also worth noting you get some extras if you have a Madden NFL 2006 save, but it is nothing that will greatly affect gameplay.

Crash mode is definitely one of my favorite parts of the game because that is all you do, is crash. In many ways it is like going to a Casino and betting money because you never know exactly if you are going to hit big money, even if you hit that precise spot that you know you need to hit to get the big cash. To even begin you normally need to pick a car that is pretty heavy, and hopefully the fastest. It all depends on your conditions however and if their are ramps where lighter cars may be critical. To start off you have a nitrous bar which when you press A, the meter goes up to the top, you press A on the green part, then you press A again when it gets down to the green part on the bottom. If you perfectly time it, you go off without a hitch. If you do it to late, you can blow your engine, which sucks online as you get no money, but offline you can do over all you want. When you hit the vehicles, eventually enough will pile up so that your crash-breaker is built up; when that is built up, you rapidly press B. What follows is a thermal nuclear like explosion, where everything goes into slow-mo, barrels, cars, wheels, crates, and everything else go off in many different directions and you have better change of hitting things. Then because of that, more cars will crash, and you cover more lanes. Sometimes you will be on a bridge and get a crash-breaker, so when you do you can actually direct your totaled car inch by inch, off the bridge and into more traffic. It actually has a lot more strategy than it would seem. The most ingenious thing about the crash modes is, using the paths with many variations, traffic coming at you head-on, and traffic going the same direction you can actually have to hunt people down and destroy them in many cases. I had perfect boost with my truck at the starting line, went off a ramp with tens of thousands of feet below me, the air whistling by, and then after flying for hundreds of feet a crash onto the other side of the mountain totaling dozens of cars below. There is another crash mode, which you can have two players up against each other, but the problem with this one is that even though you may hit some cars, the other person could hit one car at the exact same time but get far more. So it isn’t as much of a game of skill, as it is a great game of chance when doing this one.